A few weeks ago, Twitter announced that advertisers can use broad match to target keywords contained within tweets, demonstrating that Twitter is taking a tip from Google’s monetization strategies.

A month ago, Pinterest announced that it doubled revenue sent to retailers on Black Friday. Pinterest-driven revenue more than tripled on Cyber Monday. The average pin now generates $0.78 in sales and drives two visits to a company’s website.

A year ago, Google started charging for Google Product Listing Ads. Today, for some queries, Product Listing Ads are the first thing shown on Google’s search engine results page – above both unpaid algorithmic search results and AdWords text ads.

And perhaps in a not too distant future, marketers will be able to buy ads on a pay-per-gaze and pay-per-emotion basis on Google Glass.

Pins, Tweets, search engine queries, gazes and even pupil dilation have one thing in common that makes them so valuable to brands – they contain details on what consumers want.

The key challenge for brands is how to show relevant ads across an ever-increasing array of devices and user interfaces.

Lessons from the semantic Web

The semantic web – like Google’s Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori – promises to dramatically improve the relevance and usefulness of algorithmic search engine results. By organizing knowledge around entities connected via a graph of relationships, the semantic web is a giant step forward in better serving consumers as it helps surface the underlying intent in search-engine inquiries.

Here’s a brief example of the semantic web in action helps illustrate how it can better serve consumers.

When searching for “Nicolas Cage,” the left side of the Google search results page is what search looks like without the sematic web – a bunch of links essentially organized by popularity and/or authoritativeness. Alternatively, the right side of the search results page shows structured knowledge about Nicolas Cage. Chances are, the right side of the page is much more useful to the average user than the left side of the page.

How marketers can benefit from a commercial semantic Web

The semantic Web is a powerful technology for search engines, but for marketers to benefit from it, each query – or intent – needs to be mapped to Google and/or Microsoft’s entities. Consumer intent also needs to be mapped to the products and services sold by marketers – the marketers’ entities. For this to happen, a commercial semantic web is needed.

Here’s an analogy: Consumer behavior across digital channels is like different dialects of Chinese. The underlying consumer intent behind the different behaviors is like written Chinese – all the different behaviors (dialects) can map back to one common language. The semantic Web organizes knowledge into entities, and is like a completely different language, like Spanish. Google and Microsoft provide the translation from written Chinese to Spanish. Meanwhile, marketers speak an entirely differently language – one of their own products and services. This language may as well be Russian.

In order for marketers to avoid becoming experts in device-specific or interface-specific consumer behavior, a commercial semantic web is needed to (a) organize knowledge around marketers’ entities, and (b) allow a one-time translation between consumer intents (written Chinese) and marketers’ products and services (Russian).

Once everyone is speaking the same language, a one-time, device-specific or interface-specific “grammar” that maps consumer behavior to consumer intent would need to be defined. For example, on Google Glass, a gaze of more than five seconds might be associated with an intent to buy the same item. A Facebook post with the word “hungry” in it while in Foster City, Calif. might map to an intent to eat soon (in and around Foster City).

While Google and Microsoft have led the charge in the semantic Web to date, the semantic web primarily improves algorithmic search results for consumers. For brands to benefit for the semantic Web, a commercial semantic web that maps consumer intent to marketers’ products and services is needed. A commercial semantic Web would make digital marketing across different devices and interfaces much more scalable and economic. It would also allow marketers to focus more on the underlying consumer intent, and less on the device-specific (or interface-specific) behaviors. In turn, consumers will receive more useful ads across all their devices and interfaces.

In other words, it’s the underlying intent that matters, not the user interface. This is the future of digital experiences, and it will be here before you know it.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]